Anti-Filipino sentiment
The American colonization of the Philippines instigated the immigration of many Filipinos to America, either as pensionados, who came to further their education, or as laborers, who worked in Hawaiian plantations, California farms, and the Alaska fishing industry.
[3] These interactions between Filipino men and white women were facilitated in part by the taxi dance halls, often visited by the migrant population, during the 1920s.
[19][20][21] Tensions eased after Cabinet Secretary Jose Rene Almendras and Joseph Estrada secretly went to Hong Kong to talk to officials and the victim's families.
[24][25] Racist attitudes towards foreign migrant workers, including Filipinos, are almost endemic in gulf Arab nations, where they are given very few human rights.
Due to the fact that this is one of many such incidents of rights abuses, a diplomatic spat ensued between the Philippines and Kuwait in which it banned Filipinos from working in the country until it enacted reforms.
[27] Sabahan locals pejoratively refer to illegal immigrants from the southern Philippines as Pilak, meaning silver or money in the Tausug language.
[28] The cause of this anti-sentiment is due to the Muslim Filipino illegal immigrants, who arrived in the 1970s from the Southern Philippines insurgency,[29] bringing along their social problems, culture of crime, and poverty conditions, as well as taking away jobs, business opportunities and allegedly stealing Sabahan native land (NCR) in the state.
Sabah Health Department said that infectious disease among illegal immigrants was on the rise resulting in more expenditures, as well as provisions for more funds to accommodate the logistics, such as medical officers and others.
[35] This discrimination was a result of Filipino immigrants to Sabah fleeing the violence of the Moro conflict which destroyed their homes in Mindanao and Sulu; a conflict originated from the atrocities committed during Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s under his Martial Law, which include massacres and abuses towards the Muslim community in Southern Mindanao.
In 2014, a plan to hold a Philippine Independence Day celebration on Singapore's main shopping street, Orchard Road, was cancelled following online complaints by some Singaporeans who said the space was special to locals.
One blogger called the move "insensitive", saying: "Celebrating your Independence Day openly in the public (especially [at a] iconic/tourist location like Orchard Road) is provocative".
[39][40] Anti-Filipino sentiment has continued to swirl online, culminating in a blog titled "Blood Stained Singapore" suggesting ways to abuse Filipinos, calling them "an infestation".
The suggestions, which included pushing Filipinos out of trains and threats to spray insecticide on them, eventually caused the blog to be taken down by Google for infringing content rules.
